24

The Swingers Club

A few days before the close of 1967, Ray wrote a telling letter to the American-Southern African Council in Washington, D.C.

Dear Sir: I recently read an article in the Los Angeles Times on your council. The John Birch Society provided me with your address. My reason for writing is that I am considering immigrating to Rhodesia, however, there are a couple legal questions involved:

One: The U.S. government will not issue a passport for travel to Rhodesia.

Two: Would their be any way to enter Rhodesia legally (from the Rhodesian point of view)?

I would appreciate any information you could give me on the above subject or any other information on Rhodesia.1

The American-Southern African Council, a group established to improve relations with Rhodesia and South Africa, responded to Ray with a form letter, enclosing literature about the country.² It was not, of course, the first time Ray had shown interest in going to one of Africa’s two countries whose governments preached and practiced political and social race segregation. Ray’s initial curiosity about Rhodesia arose while he was at Jeff City, when he told other prisoners that he considered it one of the places to which he might one day move. Once, when his brother John visited him at Jeff City, James mentioned that he thought Ian Smith was doing a good job as Rhodesian prime minister. Ray’s comment came the month after the Smith government had condemned three black men to death for murder. Queen Elizabeth commuted their sentences, but Smith defied the crown and hanged them anyway.3 And from Mexico, Ray had answered a magazine advertisement and sent off for information about immigrating there.

In addition to his growing interest in Rhodesia, the December 28 letter also disclosed that Ray, often incorrectly thought of as apolitical, had been in touch with the John Birch Society. A check of the Birch Society’s records in Los Angeles revealed that while he had called them, he was not a member.⁴ But Ray, after the assassination, realized that even such a brief contact might be significant, and in his letters to Huie listed the call and some to “other organizations” as one of five points that could be used against him by the prosecution.⁵ The “other organizations” that Ray thought could be problematic were never identified.

A few days after his inquiry about Rhodesia, Ray drove to Las Vegas to celebrate his first New Year’s Eve out of prison since 1959. He went alone and slept in his car, and while he did not gamble, he watched others at the clubs along the Strip.⁶

Since his return from New Orleans in late December, Ray had not made a new appointment with Dr. Mark Freeman, the clinical psychologist he had visited five times. “He didn’t know nothing about hypnosis,” Ray later complained.⁷ Instead, on Thursday, January 4, Ray turned up at the office of the Reverend Xavier von Koss, head of the International Society of Hypnosis. The middle-aged Koss, who advertised himself as “an internationally recognized authority on hypnosis and self-hypnosis in the field of self-improvement,” was well known for seminars to help businessmen develop more self-confidence.

“I remember him clearly,” said Koss. “He seemed very much interested in self-improvement. He wanted to find a way to improve himself and his life. He had read several books on the subject and was impressed with the degree of mind concentration which one can obtain by the use of hypnosis.… He also seemed to be aware of self-image and its importance to a person.”⁸

When Koss questioned Ray about his goals in life, “he told me he was considering taking a course in bartending.… But when I emphasized that he must complete his course in bartending, that he must work hard, that he must go to night school, that he must construct a settled-down life, I could feel a wall rising between us. I lost him. His mind moved far away from what I was saying to him.”

Koss classified Ray as a “recognition type—he desires recognition from his group, from himself. He yearns to feel that he is somebody. The desire for recognition for him is superior to sex, superior to money, superior to self-preservation.”9

When he tested Ray for hypnosis, he encountered a “strong subconscious resistance, he could not cooperate,” but Koss was not surprised, as that was typical of people who hid something they were fearful of revealing. Feeling sorry for Ray but unable to help him, he merely recommended some books. In addition to the Maltz book, Psycho-Cybernetics, which Ray already had, Koss suggested How to Cash In on Your Hidden Memory Power by William Hersey and Self-Hypnotism: The Technique and Its Use in Daily Living by Leslie LeCron. When Ray was eventually captured two months after the King assassination, he was carrying well-worn copies of each of those books.

Besides his visit to Koss, January was a whirlwind of activity for Ray. He was still sending money orders for his weekly locksmithing correspondence classes. And every two to three days he attended hourlong sessions at the National Dance Studio. There, where he saw the same instructors and students for seven weeks, he failed to make a single friend and was considered by others to be either “unsociable,” “bashful,” or a “true introvert.”¹⁰ Showing up for classes invariably in a dark suit, shirt, and tie with a tie clip and cufflinks, wearing imitation-alligator loafers, he often stood awkwardly on the side, staring at his feet while pulling on one of his earlobes, waiting for his next partner to take him onto the dance floor.¹¹ Once he attended a party for twenty students, but he spent the night mostly by himself, and even after some drinks could manage only a stiff conversation confined to dancing.¹² His dancing, at least, had improved. In Birmingham his instructors remembered him as clumsy, while in Los Angeles most judged him fair to good. Although his instructors recalled that he was “crazy” about dancing, his personal stiffness held him back.¹³

In the middle of his dance lessons, on January 19, Ray enrolled in a six-week, $220 course at the International School of Bartending on Sunset Boulevard.¹⁴ On the application, he listed Marie Martin and Rita and Charlie Stein as references, and concocted a recent employment with a fictitious Mr. Willer.¹⁵ He attended classes six hours daily, five days a week, saying later that since bartending was a universal job, it might make it easier for him to get work when he eventually settled into a new country.¹⁶ He told other students that he had been a chef in the merchant marine, but that the work was so hard he had abandoned it.¹⁷ It might be a coincidence, but Ray’s brother John had officially opened the Grapevine Tavern a few weeks earlier, and Ray may have thought he would one day settle into one of the family’s few straight enterprises.

Two days after enrolling in the bartending school, Ray moved several blocks from Serrano Avenue to the St. Francis Hotel-Apartments on Hollywood Boulevard.¹⁸ An FBI report later described his new building as a “den of iniquity” teeming with prostitution and drug trafficking.19 Ray wrote his former landlord a short note and enclosed his apartment key, but gave no reason for the move.²⁰ Later, Ray said that he relocated because he had given Dr. Freeman “my right name, I had also given him my phone no. and … I moved from Serrano St. address as I thought I mite be put on the top 10 and he would find out.”²¹ While most of his neighbors at the St. Francis were retirees, Ray liked that the Sultan Room was on the ground floor. His $85-a-month room had no telephone and was adjacent to the building’s two-story orange neon sign, which bathed his small apartment in a steady, eerie glow* The only time other residents saw him was occasionally on Thursday nights, when Ray visited the television room, off the main lobby, to watch the evening’s prizefights. At those times, he sat by himself and did not talk to anyone.²²

Not long after he moved to the St. Francis, Rhodesia was again on Ray’s mind. This time he wrote to the Orange County, California, chapter of the Friends of Rhodesia, another organization that attempted to foster better relations with the United States. Ray thanked the group’s president, Ronald Hewitson, for his previous help in “clarifying most of my questions regarding immigration” (Hewitson later claimed he could not find a copy of the first letter to which Ray referred).²³ In his second communication, Ray said he did not intend to leave for Rhodesia until November 1968, but that in the meantime he wanted to subscribe to Rhodesian Commentary, a publication that extolled the white-run country. If Ray had decided to kill King by this time, it appears his plan did not yet include a timetable.

But Rhodesia was again only briefly on his mind. On January 29, he sent a $4.25 money order to the Los Angeles Free Press, an underground newspaper filled with personal classifieds. Ray’s ad ran in the February 2 issue: “Single male Cauc. 36 yrs, 5–11, 170 lbs, Digs Fr. Cult, [oral sex], desire’s discreet meeting with passionate married female for mutual enjoyment, and/or female for swing session apt. furn. will ex. photo. Write Eric S. 406 So. 2nd St., Alhambra, 91802.”*²⁴ The day before Ray’s advertisement ran in the Free Press, he also paid one dollar to a local correspondence club—the Local Swinger—for the names and addresses of five swingers.²⁵ Ray took at least a dozen Polaroid photos of himself and sent them to women whose advertisements he answered in the Free Press, as well as to the women whose names he received from the Local Swinger.²⁶ Typical was his February 17 letter to one of the women:

Dear Miss:

I am answering you listing in the Local Swinger since I think I share most of your interests, with emphasis on French cult, and swing sessions. I have just returned from Mexico after five yrs. and the few females I have met don’t go for the swing parties and it takes two to swing. The same routine gets boring, don’t you think. Will close until I here from you.

Sincerely,

Eric S. Galt

5533 Hollywood Blvd.

Hollywood, Calif.

90028

Ph.464–1131 ²⁷

Later in the month, Ray bought more sex manuals from Futura Books for $6.44, and also ordered a set of Japanese chrome handcuffs for $9.98.^†28

What was Ray’s motive in soliciting swingers and sending out his own photos? It initially seems another effort to get women for his still-stagnant porn venture. Stuck with $400 in camera equipment and not having used it yet except for some poor-quality photos in Mexico, he must have been frustrated. He did not, by the accounts of those who still saw him alone at the St. Francis apartments, meet anyone through the Free Press or the Local Swinger. Yet Ray has offered a different reason for placing the personal classifieds and then distributing his photos, and it ties to something surprising he did in mid-February: He had plastic surgery. “I didn’t get plastic surgery to change my personally or future as you mite have construed by reading the Maltz book,” Ray wrote. “I got the surgery to change my facial features so it would be harder to identify me throught pictures circulated my law officials.… What I did was circulate a lot of pictures around through this club [the Local Swinger] then I had plastic surgery. The reason I did this was that I knew sooner or later the F.B.I, would get me on the Top 10, and I assumed someone that I had mailed a picture to would sent it to the F.B.I., meanwhile I would have had my features altered plus the fact that the pictures have made me look considerable younger.”29

Ray visited Dr. Russell Hadley on Hollywood Boulevard on February 19. He had an initial consultation regarding rhinoplasty, filling out an application in which he lied as usual about his age (three years younger) and listed his nearest relative as the fictitious Karl L. Galt. He told Hadley that he wanted the surgery because he was getting work in a television commercial and needed the improvement.*³⁰

Ray paid $200 cash for the surgery, which was done on March 5. The doctor’s records show a “nasal tip reconstruction for pointed tip. Under local anesthesia in office.” Two days later, Ray returned to have the nasal packing, a standard procedure in rhinoplasty, removed. On March 11, the day after his fortieth birthday, the stitches were taken out.*³¹

Rhinoplasty is a major cosmetic procedure, yet following the surgery Ray “got to the hotel, [and] I moved the bandage to the right to change my appearance more.” Trying to further alter the shape of his nose within hours of surgery must have been excruciatingly painful, and it is further evidence of how badly Ray wanted to change his appearance. No sooner did he have the rhinoplasty than “I intend to go to another dr. and have my ear changed (these things are not noticeable on person to person contack but they show up in pictures) I didn’t have time for the ear.”³² Again, Ray emphasized his fixation on his imaginary importance to the FBI: “The reason was that I expected to be put on the top 10 any day since I excaped over the wall.”³³

Ray’s mistaken belief that he was about to be placed on the FBI’s ten most-wanted list is not just a simple error in judgment, but calls into serious question how far he was removed from reality. It would not take a very clever man to discern that Ray, a petty thief who had managed to escape from a state prison, and had in the meantime failed to be fingered for any subsequent crime, would be of little or no interest to the Bureau. That he thought of himself as daring enough to be in the FBI’s criminal elite, indicates that while few thought of him as confident, he obviously considered himself as somebody to be reckoned with. If he had learned of the bounty on King in New Orleans, instead of being intimidated by the assignment, Ray would likely have embraced it as a confirmation of how clever he thought he was. It was as though Ray’s nearly ten months of freedom had somehow emboldened him. Not only had he pulled off a successful escape from a maximum-security prison, but he had managed to stay free while traveling through three countries, visiting his family, and smuggling narcotics, and he had more money than at any other time in his life.

Not surprisingly, he denies that he was thinking of murdering King when he had plastic surgery and sent out the presurgery photos. He contended, “I certainly wouldn’t have circulated my picture around if I thought I was going to be the object of a world wide manhunt the next month, plastic surgery or not.”³⁴ That initially sounds reasonable. But Ray contradicts himself by saying that on the one hand he wanted to distribute photos to create confusion in a manhunt since he expected to be momentarily placed on the most-wanted list, and on the other hand he would not have sent his pictures around if he knew law enforcement would be hunting him for the King murder. Placement on the Top Ten, for any reason, would mean the start of an international game of hide and seek once his picture was broadcast as part of a wildly successful weekly television program, The E.B.I. One of the reasons Ray might have concluded that “sooner or later the F.B.I, would get me on the Top 10” was that he was then planning the assassination.

When Ray eventually realized that his strong interest in altering his appearance so near the King assassination might signal foreknowledge of the murder, he changed his reason for sending out his photos and having the surgery. No longer did he tie it to a plan to mislead law enforcement in case of a large manhunt, but claimed it was merely because “I wanted to collect some extra names and addresses in case I needed a new identity. And in the process of meeting marks, I might even recruit an ally.”35 But that rationale, written almost twenty-five years after his contemporaneous explanations to Huie, rings hollow.

It is also notable that in his first account Ray asserted, “I didn’t have time for the ear [surgery].” While he lived in Los Angeles, however, he was enjoying an eclectic lifestyle that was not constrained by any deadlines. That he did not “have time” for the ear surgery, and had to suddenly leave Los Angeles only eighteen days before King’s murder, is another indicator that he may already have settled on making an attempt on King. It is probable that notwithstanding his denials, the plastic surgery and the circulation of presurgery photos were part of groundwork for the assassination. Something certainly provoked this rather significant effort at subterfuge, for if all Ray wanted was his long-claimed passport and move to Africa, the surgery and photos would have been unnecessary.

Furthermore on March 2, three days before he had the rhinoplasty, Ray had graduated from bartending school. As part of the graduation, he had a picture taken, holding his completion certificate, with the school’s manager, Tomas Lau. Ray fretted about that picture. While he could not arouse suspicion by being the only student to refuse to have a graduation photo taken, he did his best to make it useless for further identification. In it, dressed in a barman’s jacket and bow tie—the first time he had ever worn a bow tie—Ray appears to be in a tuxedo. At the moment the picture was snapped, he closed his eyes, later saying he hoped not to be identified.*

Near this time, Ray was involved in an incident at one of his favorite bars, the Rabbit’s Foot, that has aroused much controversy concerning his racial attitudes near the assassination. “On this particular nite,” Ray wrote to Huie, “they was someone sitting next to me who talked about 30 minutes without stopping about the state of the world. Their was also a young girl sitting on the other side of me. I mite of told the guy who was talking to me where I was from as I think he ask me, or she mite have seen my car with the Alabama license on it. Anyhow, when the conversationalist left she started by asking me how come they deny colors their rights in Alabama. I think I ask her if she had ever been there or something like that and walked out. Their was two guys next to her and when I went out they must of followed me.… Anyhow, the big one grab me from behind and pulled my coat over my arms (I had a suit on) the shorter one started hitting and asking for my money.”36 Since Ray did not have his “.38 equalizer” with him, the men were able to steal his watch and jacket. When he got to the Mustang, he realized that his car keys were in the jacket, so he waited until the following morning to make sure the police had not been called, and then had a local locksmith make a new pair for him.*³⁷

However, witnesses to the confrontation told the FBI a quite different version. Bo Del Monte, a Rabbit’s Foot bartender, was interviewed only a few weeks after the assassination. He knew Ray as Doug Collins, a name he said Ray used at the racially integrated bar. Del Monte recalled that Ray and the female patron, Pat Goodsell, got into such a donnybrook that Ray dragged her toward the door and screamed, “I’ll drop you off in Watts [Los Angeles’s largest black ghetto] and we’ll see if you like it there.”³⁸

James Morrison, another bartender, recalled that when he once discussed Robert Kennedy and politics with Ray, Ray became incensed and enthusiastically praised Wallace.³⁹ He confirmed Del Monte’s recollection that on the night of the fight over blacks and the civil rights movement, Ray dragged Goodsell toward the door while shouting. Another customer, who knew Goodsell, broke up the argument.

When the Select Committee reinvestigated the issue in 1978, it discovered that the woman, Goodsell, had died, and it located only one of the bartenders, Del Monte. Ten years after his original interview, he downplayed the altercation and Ray’s right-wing politics. In his second version, Del Monte said that Ray did not discuss Wallace, and that on the night of the incident, there was no fight—“there were a lot of people sitting at the bar taking part in a philosophical discussion concerning someone in the group saying blacks could come into a white area and be safe and whites could not go into a black area and be safe.”40 Before the Select Committee investigators, Del Monte added that he suspected that Ray, who had been a regular at the bar for three months, was on heroin, because he had the sullen and drawn look of an addict, and often nodded into a stupor at the bar.*⁴¹ However, the Select Committee also located Dennis LeMaster, the FBI special agent who had spoken with Del Monte in 1968. He was adamant that his original reports of interviews with both Rabbit’s Foot bartenders were accurate and that he had had no reason to exaggerate or falsify anything in them.⁴²

While the actual argument in the bar adds little to understanding the fervor of Ray’s racism shortly before King’s assassination, the subsequent mugging in the parking lot raises a perplexing issue. It happened sometime in late February, but no one can pinpoint the exact day. What is known is that on Wednesday, February 28, somebody telephoned the Highway Bureau in Montgomery, Alabama, and requested a duplicate license for Eric S. Galt. The Highway Bureau mailed the duplicate and a bill for twenty-five cents that same day to Gait’s permanent Alabama address, the rooming house Ray had occupied during the 1967 summer.⁴³ (The rooming house had a hallway table where mail was placed for tenants.) Four days later, the twenty-five-cent fee was sent to Montgomery by mail. Who picked it up if Ray was in Los Angeles? Moreover, Ray is adamant that he did not lose his license in the parking-lot mugging.

Memphis prosecutor James Beasley said “any friend” could have received the license for Ray, but had no guess as to who that could be.⁴⁴ William Bradford Huie’s investigation concluded that Ray had lied and that in fact he had lost his license when his wallet was stolen in the parking-lot dispute. Ray telephoned the Alabama Highway Bureau for a replacement, according to Huie, and then instructed the Birmingham post office to send any mail to him care of general delivery in Los Angeles. He also sent the Highway Bureau the twenty-five-cent fee.⁴⁵

When pressed on the issue by the Select Committee, Ray was vague, giving the impression that it was another matter in which he was being less than honest. Asked whether he remembered ordering a duplicate license, he said, “I don’t recall. I got these vague ideas that I may have ordered two of them or something, but that wouldn’t make much sense, but if I’d lost the driver’s license I’d have most likely lost the registration, but I just can’t recollect losing it at that time.”46 It is even possible that Ray did not lose his license when mugged, but that the incident scared him enough so that he wanted a backup. In either case, it appears probable that Ray ordered the duplicate license for Galt and there was no confederate retrieving a copy in Birmingham.*

In early March, Ray made final preparations to leave Los Angeles. He had stopped taking dance lessons weeks earlier, forfeiting some of his money and telling the instructors that he was accepting a bartender’s job. But in fact, when the manager at the bartending school, Tomas Lau, called Ray a week after his March 2 graduation and offered him work, Ray declined, saying that he was leaving town in two weeks to visit his brother.^†47

Shortly before his departure from Los Angeles, Ray ran into Marie Martin and told her he was heading south. Once again, she asked him if he would mind stopping in New Orleans, to drop off a package with her family, and he agreed.⁴⁸ Ray appeared in need of money, she thought, which she considered unusual for him, as he always seemed to have a ready supply of twenty-dollar bills. When she mentioned it, he told her he was waiting for money from his brother.⁴⁹

On March 16 and 17, 1968, Martin Luther King visited Los Angeles. Newspapers and local television and radio extensively covered the visit. On his first night, King addressed the California Democratic Council and called for President Johnson’s defeat. The following night, he spoke at the Second Baptist Church about the “meaning of hope.” There is no evidence that Ray stalked King or tried to get near him on either of those days. If he had decided to move against King, his brother Jerry is almost certainly right when he said that Ray believed killing King could be done only in the South, where people might be willing to view the crime sympathetically.

On March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, Ray executed a change-of-address card advising that his old address at the St. Francis apartments had been changed to general delivery at the main post office in Atlanta. He noted on the card that the new address would be good only until April 25, 1968.50 If killing King was on his mind, he had given himself a small window.*

* The FBI checked all calls placed from the St. Francis’s two pay telephones and none could be connected to Ray. The hotel’s manager, Allan O. Thompson, initially told the FBI that Ray had never received a single call. However, later he changed his mind and said that he had had a conversation with a man he refused to identify, who “prompted his recollection” that Ray had actually received four calls from a “James C. Hardin,” originating from Atlanta and New Orleans. Since Ray was not there to receive the calls, Thompson supposedly passed the information to him. Thompson also claimed that in mid-March, Hardin—described as a middle-aged white male, with a dark complexion and dark hair and a Southern accent—showed up at the hotel looking for Ray. Again, Ray was not there. The FBI, despite a nationwide search, could never find anyone by that name or alias who fit the story. The Bureau concluded Thompson’s revised story was wrong and might have been motivated by his desire to cash in on the case’s $100,000 reward (MURKIN 4061–4142, section 51).

* The Alhambra address was a mail-forwarding service Ray used for February for the Free Press ads. Ray later fretted that the prosecutors might use his placement of those classifieds against him since the Free Press was “a very liberal publication.”

^† Tiffany Enterprises ran the advertisement for the handcuffs, but the International Police Equipment Company of Los Angeles filled the order. When Ray’s order was received, the company was temporarily out of stock, and it shipped the handcuffs late. They arrived at Ray’s forwarding address in Atlanta. Also, in late May, solicitations to purchase lewd films, addressed to Eric S. Galt, arrived at his former Los Angeles address. Somebody had purchased the Galt name from a mailing list and thought he would be a potential customer for video pornography, unaware that he was then the subject of an international manhunt for the King murder.

* By mid-February, when he had his consultation with Hadley, Ray was evidently also making preparations to leave Los Angeles soon. He swapped his more expensive console television for Marie Martin’s small portable set, telling her that he was going to do some traveling and wanted a set that he could carry in his car. Louis Lomax thought Ray actually made a secret trip to New Orleans in February, in order to get his final orders on the assassination. Others have speculated that Ray visited Chicago for several days, where his two brothers were admittedly at the Atlantic Hotel for a brief reunion. However, the Mustang’s odometer shows neither of those trips was possible. On February 13, Ray had the car serviced at a local gas station and the odometer showed 34,185 miles. When the car was found by the FBI after the assassination it had an additional 5,000 miles, almost all of which can be explained by Ray’s known destinations through his abandoning of the car after the assassination. An extra trip to Chicago or New Orleans would have required several thousand more miles.

Also, toward the end of the month, Ray fired off one of his unusual letters, for which there is no apparent explanation—he wrote the Social Security Administration in Baltimore asking “what effect the amendments to the Social Security Act 1956, 1960, 1961, 1965 had in regards two who was covered, such as the number of employes a firm could hire without paying social security.” They answered him after the assassination.

* A typical part of all plastic surgery is the taking of before and after photos, so that the patient can best determine the results. In Ray’s case, on the day the first photos were taken, something was wrong with Dr. Hadley’s camera, and the pictures did not turn out. By the time the “after” photos were due to be taken—six to eight weeks later—Ray had left Los Angeles.

* Ray’s closing of his eyes worked. An FBI sketch artist later drew the eyes in, and the photo did not look like Ray, even to his own family. Yet it ended up as one of three photos on the international wanted posters for the King murderer. The other two were eight-year-old mug shots of Ray sporting a crew cut. Those pictures also looked markedly different from the 1968 Ray. All the wanted-poster photos aided Ray in staying free, and also confused many of the initial witnesses approached by the FBI.

* William Paisley, who sold Ray the Mustang, said he had given Ray two sets of keys. Ray claimed he gave one set to Raoul in Birmingham. If he lost a set in Los Angeles, the fact that he had to have an extra set made is often used by Ray and his supporters to credit the existence of Raoul. However, the FBI was unable ever to locate a locksmith that made a new lock for any Mustang near the time of the incident, calling into question whether Ray lied about losing his keys. Moreover, even if he only had one set while in Los Angeles, there are several possibilities as to what happened to the second set, from Ray having lost it during his cross-country and international travel to his having sent it to one of his brothers.

* One indication that Ray may have again been using drugs is that he admitted in the 20,000 Words that he had visited a “pill doctor” in Los Angeles, but could not remember the man’s name. The FBI could not find that doctor.

* Although the issue is one of the favorites of conspiracy buffs, no one has ever offered a reason as to why anyone would want a second Galt license for a plot to kill King. No issue later developed in the case in which a second person passed as Galt, or another Galt identification was presented anywhere. As with many similar issues, the replacement license sometimes consumes pages in conspiracy books, but what possible sinister implication it might have had, even if true, is never explained.

^† At the graduation ceremony, a fellow student, Richard Gonzalez, had also overheard Ray say that he was soon leaving for Birmingham to visit his brother.

* In the 20,000 Words, Ray said Raoul told him in a letter that he would meet Ray at a bar in New Orleans and then “we would go from New Orleans to Atlanta, Ga.” To Dan Rather, nine years later, Ray changed his story—“I never knew I was going to Atlanta until I arrived in Birmingham, and there was no forwarding address—of course, that would be very damaging against me.” When questioned by the House Select Committee, he was asked if he had filed a change-of-address card while in Los Angeles. “No, I didn’t,” said Ray. “I’m positive I didn’t.” The committee then produced his change-of-address card, submitted while still in Los Angeles, and confronted Ray. He then backed down and admitted that when he left Los Angeles he had known that he was heading to Atlanta (HSCA vol. II, p. 51).